Heroes

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Thirtyish Peter Bayle is struggling with an unending stream of baggage,
from his reluctance to defend his doctoral thesis on the philosopher
Empiricus, to his father’s early death from cancer, to his teenaged
sister’s suicidal moodiness, to his pronounced bent toward alcoholism,
to his tyrannical girlfriend, Jane, also his employer at Toronto Life.
When Jane assigns him to Witchita, Kansas, to do a piece on the Warriors
hockey team and the burgeoning hockey craze in Midwest America,
Peter’s burdens only increase. He crusades to have the Warriors’
owners renovate the dangerously deteriorating arena, a move that
seriously backfires. He reneges on the Toronto Life article and maxes
out his corporate expense card on booze and drugs. He tries, and fails,
to seduce his dying friend’s girlfriend—a reformed drug addict with
whom he conspires to frame the manager of the hockey team. About to be
exposed for this caper, he skips back to Canada, only to find his
baggage still waiting for him.

Robertson is adept at getting inside the skin of his characters and
presenting even the least savory of them in an empathetic light. He can
also turn a comic scene with the best of them, and his hockey dialogue
is on the money. The structure sprawls at times but overall the novel is
pleasantly diverting.